– that’s what they had always taught me, and I got to the stage where staying didn’t feel like a choice any more. It was just procrastination.
I’d been working in the village store, selling cigarettes, groceries and booze. The kind of job teenage girls pick up after high school when they’re waiting for life to start, and it was like that for me, too, in a way. After I mailed my equivalence tests in the province and they sent me my diploma, I started at the shop as a way of making money before my next step, but then I stuck around. It was familiar and comfortable – like everything else. Most of the year, I knew everyone who came in, though it was different in the summer, with the cottage people and folk heading north to go hunting. But mainly, it was routine. Mothers came in mid-morning with small kids. Seniors needed help finding things every week. Just after the mass at one o’clock, a grey-haired man always bought a two-four of Molson and told me to smile. Always the same. Except one day, he asked me what I was waiting for. He said I looked tired, like maybe I was drowning. Who was he to comment? But later, I wondered if he recognized something. I couldn’t say what I was waiting for. People came through Birthwood and told us how lucky we were to have this slice of creation for our own. Maybe I was waiting to feel that. Bas and Rika did, obviously. And Felicity, too. I thought it would come with time or age. Except now, apparently, I looked like I was drowning. Well, that wasn’t true. I was just – what? Caught in an eddy, going round and round and watching the same piece of sky.
So, I made up my mind and chose to move to Ottawa.
I’d leave most of my things behind: my old photo albums and papers, the bookshelves Bas made me and my work clothes. I’d rent a furnished apartment at first, I decided, and find a new job. I could learn to live alone in the middle of a city. Eat meals on my own, visit museums and galleries, maybe even find work there, and when I actually managed to do all that, I told people that was why I had moved. For work and culture. For art.
But that wasn’t true. I moved to Ottawa because it sat at the end of the river. The T-junction of the Gatineau and the Ottawa. T is for time to go.
When I was small, the river map on the wall showed the Gatineau curled like Felicity’s hair. It laced among a hundred lakes and Bas told me the name was Algonquin – Te-nagàdino-zìbi – which meant the river that stops your journey. There were rocks to portage around and narrow places where even a canoe couldn’t slip through. But there was also a story about a French explorer who drowned in the river, and he was called Gatineau, too. Nicolas Gatineau. There was a high school named after him and I found his name in a history book. Some stories come twinned and some things are true.
Gran’s tea towels still hung on the hooks by the stove, and her spices sat on the thin shelf with the egg timer. But no coat by the door, no teacups to be rinsed. I noticed these things and waited for grief. I expected it and watched myself, waited. But it didn’t come. Instead, I felt disconnected and cold. I didn’t know how to do this.
Felicity should be here. Well, not sitting on the counter. She’d likely know what to do about the goose outside. And about the cupboards and the cake-stand and all the photographs and books. She’d negotiate presence and absence all right. She’d cry and swear and find a way to be practical, too. And, apart from everything else, she’d know the house inside out. She’d know where to begin.
When Mateo and I had moved into our apartment on Cartier Street, she’d been full of suggestions. Shelves and rugs and paint for the window frames. I had to explain to her that it was a rental and that we weren’t planning to stay. Mateo had always wanted to buy something new, something shiny. He had his eye on one of the glass condo towers going up in the Market with their beautiful views of the river, all those sunsets and sunrises, and miles between us and the sidewalks below. I agreed to see a model penthouse one afternoon and, after my shift, I waited for him in front of the gallery. I watched the sun catching the spires of the basilica, and a family lingering underneath the spider, their toddler dancing between the legs. I thought about what it would be like to live so close to work and in such a small space, too. Mateo had said that it wouldn’t feel small – not with those views. When he came through the door, he told me I looked lovely in the light, and we walked together through the Market, past all the tourists and the tempting patios.
‘Later,’ he said, squeezing my hand. ‘After we’ve had a look. Maybe we’ll have a decision to make?’
The condo was beautiful, it really was. I liked the view from the kitchen, right up to the Gatineau Hills. He liked the quiet. ‘It feels like there is no one else up here at all. No one living on top of us. No dogs or footsteps or tricycles.’ He laughed and put his arms around my waist and I pressed my mouth into his neck, his skin dry and warm. ‘We could be happy here. Alone on the top.’
Out the window, I could see the goose grazing between the apple trees. I felt hungry. The fridge, unsurprisingly, was empty. The lawyer’s letter had also mentioned that all the perishables had been cleared away. Not words to send to a bereaved family, I thought. There must be a better way of describing a scrubbed kitchen.
I dug my own meagre supplies out of my backpack. A roll of biscuits. Two apples. A bottle of wine. I’d need more or tomorrow I wouldn’t be fit for purpose. There was a fish and chip shop in the village, so I found my coat and flicked all the lights on before closing the door behind me. It wasn’t yet properly evening, but I didn’t like the idea of walking into the house in the dark. Overhead, more geese crossed the sky, a dark V on the bright air, their rusty voices calling.
MATRON CLAIMED TO BE MOTHERLY, BUT SHE HADN’T a clue. My mum never put her foot down. She had no God-forbidding anything. She was much quieter than that.
Ahead of me, a gaggle of student nurses made their way down the corridor, looking pert and starched. From their chatter, I could tell they were due up in Maternity where they’d watch the ward nurses teach new mothers how to swaddle properly. Not Matron, though. No babies for her. I could imagine her eating them, with her cracked red lips, her pocked chin, and her eyes like lift buttons behind those thick plastic glasses. Standing behind the nursing desk, she watched every footfall on the ward, utterly unsparing. To get the attention of errant junior nurses, she snapped tongue depressors. She never drank tea. That afternoon, she’d spent her five o’clock sermon on me, filling my ears with her God-forbids. She said she was being maternal. I should be more respectful. I shouldn’t look up when receiving instruction, shouldn’t distract or interrupt, merely pay better attention and perform. My job was to trot along behind the doctors with my neat nurse’s basket, carrying the requisite tongue depressors, thermometers, scissors, and gauze. I was to be careful. Take notes. Agree. My questions were not needed. The litany ended, Matron attempted a smile.
‘I know I must sound like a proper old battleaxe,’ she said. ‘But do try to take it on board. Just a little nudge to the straight and narrow and you will be happily with us a long, long time.’
She patted my sentenced hand and released me down the corridor.
I walked slowly and thought about my mother. I pictured her out by the bay, tall in my father’s old trousers with the hems tucked into black wellies and her hands reaching up, picking sea buckthorn. Too early yet this year, of course. The berries would still be plumping back home and my mother focussed on raspberries in the garden, but when I conjured her, I saw her by the sea. I saw how the wind caught wisps from her bound hair and how small clouds scudded across the sky above her like impossible stepping stones set against the blue. She always took her time picking berries, making the day last as long as it might, and when I was little, I would be there at her feet, digging out caves in the sand dunes, hoping to find rabbits or buried treasure. Now in that bleached corridor, I remembered the berries’ sharp stickiness and their smell like sour wine. Mum mixed them with sugar and cooked them down to make a marmalade bright as oystercatchers’ bills. I missed her marmalade and all her jams – raspberry and bramble, blackcurrant